Why Does God Allow Suffering?

The problem of evil is the greatest emotional obstacle to belief in God. It simply doesn’t feel right that God should allow people to suffer, or at least to suffer as much as they do.
The late atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie, a fellow Aussie, maintained that belief in God was irrational, for if God were all-knowing, He would know that there was evil in the world; if He were all-powerful, He could prevent it; and if He were all-good, He would wish to prevent it. The fact that there is evil in the world proves that God doesn’t exist, or if he does, that He is “impotent, ignorant, or wicked.”

I’ll be honest: when I think about the kinds of evil some people endure, and are enduring even as I speak, I find myself feeling as though an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good God may not exist after all.

But feelings, however powerful, are not arguments. And since we are engaged in philosophy here, we ought to be more concerned with right thinking than with how we are feeling. In fact, when I step back and consider the problem of evil from a rational point of view, rather than simply reacting to it emotionally, I do not think it succeeds as an argument against God’s existence.

Mackie was wrong. The existence of God and the existence of evil aren’t mutually exclusive. And to see why, let’s look at the three attributes of God that Mackie named.

Omnipotence

Omnipotence does not mean the ability to do what is logically impossible because what is logically impossible is nothing at all. God cannot make a square circle, for instance, or a married bachelor, not because his power is limited, but because there is nothing there to be made. Logical contradictions are not difficult tasks awaiting divine power; they are empty descriptions.

As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, “Whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility. Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them.” It follows then that while God can create beings with free will, capable of choosing between good and evil, He cannot both grant that freedom and simultaneously override it by forcing creatures always to choose the good. A forced choice is not a free one.

C.S. Lewis captured the point succinctly: “If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God.”
Omniscience

If God has infinite knowledge, then he knows many things we don’t. This means that He may, in fact, have good reasons for permitting evil and suffering that seem inexplicable to us. Human beings have a very limited vantage point, and we often lack knowledge of things of true significance. What appears to us to be a tragedy may have effects that bring about great good, and conversely, what appears to us as a good thing may, in the long run, prove harmful.

Consider the analogy of a small child being taken to the doctor for his immunization shots. He knows the needle hurts, and he can’t understand why his own parents are allowing the doctor to cause him such pain. The child is unable to grasp that the inoculations will help prevent the much greater suffering of disease. He’s unable to perceive the greater good. Likewise, we should recognize that a being with more knowledge than us, like God, may have good reasons for things, even pain and suffering, of which we are unaware. He allows evils to exist because of His omniscience, not despite it.

Omnibenevolence

As we think about the goodness of God, we must be careful not to impose on Him our inadequate understanding of what goodness is. In his book “The Problem of Pain,” C. S. Lewis writes:

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness. . . . What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, “What does it matter so long as they are contented?” We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven, a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
Furthermore, most theists do not believe that God created us merely for happiness in this life. He created us most importantly for eternal happiness with Him in the next. So, His omnibenevolence should be judged neither by our limited human standards of goodness nor by what happens in this world alone.

Putting all this together, we can recognize that an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent creator might have good reasons for tolerating abuses of human free will that lead to evil and suffering. We may not know what all His reasons are, but we sense the value of freedom, including the value of being able to choose good freely rather than by compulsion. We can see how God’s power and knowledge can bring good out of evil in ways that our limited minds aren’t able to comprehend. In faith, we can say along with St. Paul, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom. 8:28).

Evil: An Argument for God

Evil, rather than disproving God’s existence, can actually point toward it, at least indirectly. To call something evil is not merely to register a feeling of dislike or pain, but to make a moral judgment. And moral judgments presuppose the reality of moral norms that are not reducible to individual preference or social convention. If such objective moral norms exist, then they must have an origin that transcends human opinion.

The theist would say that this origin is God. Moral laws point beyond themselves to a moral lawgiver. Only within such a conceptual framework does it make sense to say that suffering is not merely unfortunate, but unjust, that it cries out for explanation, and that it ought, somehow, to be answered. This does not dissolve the mystery of why an all-good God permits suffering and evil. It doesn’t tell us the meaning, but it does tell us that it’s not meaningless. On this view, God can bring good out of evil, ensure that injustice does not have the final word, and ultimately bring about justice in a way that the bare facts of suffering alone never could.

This is essentially St. Thomas Aquinas’ response to the problem of evil. Citing St. Augustine, he writes: “’Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.’ This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.”